*Urban Media Outlet*

I spent the last week in Portmore, Jamaica and for everyday that I was there, there was a water lock off for at least 5 hours during the morning/afternoon hours. It wasn’t long before news reported that all classes at the University of Technology in Mona, Kingston were off because the college could no longer afford to buy water to replenish their supplies as they had been doing for the past two weeks.  And while we sat on the other side of the toll road laughing at the irony of Mona being without water (since Kingston’s main source of water comes from the MONA dam) warnings across the Caribbean are that we are up for a dry, dusty year:

Farmers and ordinary householders in Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Grenada and St. Lucia among others are starting to express concern about looming water shortages resulting from the prolonged dry season that saw vastly reduced annual year-end rainfall levels.

In Trinidad for example, weather watchers at the Piarco International Airport point to statistics showing that only 10 millimeters of rain fell in January compared to a normal 71 millimeters on the books as the national long-term average.

“This should paint a picture of the level of dryness being experienced in the atmosphere. There is a lack of significant rainfall,” Trinidad weather spokesman Shakeer Baig said this week.

Down south in neighboring Guyana, Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud says that authorities have spent $1.2M to improve irrigation and to pump water into farmlands that are feeling the effects of largely absent year end rains.

As an indication of how dry it is at this time of year, in 2005 large parts of the city and coast would have been recoveringfrom flood waters after record rains and a dilapidated draining system combined to inundate low lying parts of the country. Heavy rains following rain killed five people in addition to the 35 that authorities estimate have died in 2005.

In Barbados, officials fear the idyllic tourist island has “been in drought since October, when all the forage was way below what it should have been. In addition, all the people who produced rain-fed crops recorded low yield this month,” said Adrian Trotman, acting chief of the Barbados-based Applied Meteorology and Climatology center at the Caribbean Institute for Meteorology and Hydrology. “I am amazed no one picked up on it until now,” he says.

(Bert Wilkinson-CLN)

Ladies, having trouble getting your man to wear a condom because he can’t feel anything? 

Well, no more excuses! LifeStyles has released a new mentholated condom that is lubricated inside-and-out and guaranteed to heighten the sexual experience for both partners, marketers say. But the dual lubrication of the product, known as the X2 Condom, has prompted at least one doctor to call into question its effectiveness. 

“Lubricating a condom on the inside may cause a condom to slip, which would increase the chance of pregnancy and transmission of a sexually transmitted diseases,” said Lauren Streicher, M.D., an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago. “In the absence of scientific studies confirming that this is not the case, I would not recommend use of this condom.” 

But Carol Carrozza, vice president of marketing for Ansell Healthcare Products, the makers of LifeStyles Condoms in Red Bank, N.J., says the condoms will not slide off and that they have the same amount of lubricant as normal condoms. 

Dresses Made Out of Condoms

“We’ve just divided half of the lubricant for her and half for him,” she said. “We call it game changing because it’s the first of its kind. We’ve taken condoms to the next level to encourage people to use them.” 

LifeStyles hopes that the added sensation will be a draw for consumers. The gel contains both menthol and L-Arginine, a natural amino acid that, when ingested, has been shown to help increase circulation by relaxing and dilating blood vessels to enhance blood flow; while the menthol produces a tingling sensation, according to the news release. 

Francine A. Olds, M.D., an obstetrician gynecologist in Virginia Beach, Va., is hopeful about the product. 

“It would be a great day if we could get non-users to see condoms as a means of sexual enhancement, comply, and thus have protection as the byproduct,” she said.

It is rather unfortunate to know that doctors and scientists continue to gain their power through our ignorance.  The biological concepts we cannot begin to comprehend or the medical and scientific approaches we have not let our minds fathom, are the things that keep our doctors making a mockery and a bucket load of money out of our health care.  Let us not forget that the majority of us choose professions to make a living, and many of us become sidetracked by finding ways to beat the system to increase the monthly paycheck.  So imagine if some of us were the system?  It is now rather apparent more than any other time that physicians are not exempt from this trail of thought.  Do not let the colour of their white coats stand parallel to the hue of halos, but think of it as a blank canvas that will easily bring to light the flaws and smears of the medical field.  For even in the monopoly of something as fragile, basic, and universally needed as health care, it is still business as usual.  Whether the motive is to find food for the family or to buy a mansion in Tiger Woods’ Isleworth neighbourhood, money is the means by which it can be done.  And when a lifestyle gets lavish, the multibillion dollar health care industry can easily fund it.

What many have failed to notice is that vaccines are tools that keep us trapped in the medical model. Why did our great grandparents from the countryside go to their backyards to find remedies and live well into their 90’s? Why does generation X know the routine of going to the doctor all so well but still find themselves with a lengthy list of ailments we have known for years, and those that have recently evolved to scare the world population out of their minds?  This is so because our babies are no longer being granted the same opportunity our forefathers had of giving their bodies their own chance of developing immune systems.  The Creator took time to formulate the human body, and man has once again come in between the natural process of how things should work.

Our forefathers are living proof of how viruses or bugs enter the system, and how our body inherently finds the power to fight them.  The organs within us understand their job and know how to attack and continuiously defend.  For this reason, the elderly have not been the target population of the world’s latest superbug, the H1N1 virus.  Their bodies developed during a time where the natural order of things was being restored when immune responses were trained to seek out and knock down unwanted guests.

Unfortunately, the younger generations of today do not have such intelligent fighting power.  The excess of vaccines we now receive in our first few years of life have left us totally dependent on the potent drugs.  At a first glance, this may seem live and well, but then unwanted visitors like the swine flu come knocking.  Since our bodies never learned to be independent, we are trapped in the routine of receiving another vaccine every time something a little out of the ordinary pops up.  As long as we are around, superbugs will be around, so are we to expect a world wide panic every two decades when we have an unwelcome visitor?

Not necessarily, our responsibility comes in the form of trusting ourselves.  When a headache or cold occurs it is important to let such annoyances run their natural course.  Taking one pill today will turn into many tomorrow when our bodies no longer budge to what we are forcing into it.  It is not in the interest of our now-a-days scientists that having to market more and/or stronger pills is in the best interest of their own pocket and not in our well- being.  It seems not be a concern of the majority of many  health officials to educate us about the vaccine not necessarily being a necessity for all of us.  With a compromised immune system, by all means, take the extra step to protect yourself.  But to compromise your immune system out of ignorance, open your minds and eyes to find that ending point before it is too late.

HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean region may have experienced a slight decline in new cases according to the UN AIDS agency, women still remain the most affected.

HIV prevalence is especially high among young women, says UNAIDS researchers. This may be due in part to still risky behavior on the part of some younger people. For instance, according to a 2004 national behavioral survey in Jamaica, nearly half (48 percent) of young men (aged 15–24) and 15% of young women had more than one sexual partner in the previous 12 months

In Haiti alone, HIV prevalence among pregnant women in 2006–2007 ranged from 0.8 percent in the western part of the country to 11.8 percent in one urban setting.

Children are also still affected. Last year alone, 2,300 added to the new infection rates from the disease. And paediatric antiretroviral coverage in the Caribbean is also higher (55 percent) in December 2008 than the global treatment coverage level for children (38 percent).

The Caribbean has been more heavily affected by HIV than any region outside sub-Saharan Africa and has the second highest level of adult HIV prevalence – 1 percent –1.1 percent.

But in a region with some 240,000 reported cases and 20,000 new cases alone last year, just one thousand less than the 2001, the time to celebrate a decline, however, small, seems far away.

cwn

Today, while watching PBS I came across an interesting piece about a man named John Mackey.

John Mackey is an NFL Hall of Famer who played American Football in the 1960’s and 1970’s with the Baltimore Colts. Now, John Mackey is only 68 years young….. and living with dementia.

Mackey lives in complete assisted living and is taken care of by his wife, Sylvia, who believes that his mental deterioration was caused by the powerful blows suffered to his head while in the NFL.

Mackey in 2007

Mr Mackey says, ” Every year, he would go back to the Hall of Fame ceremony, and, every year that I went back, I noticed that more and more players — and these were Hall of Fame guys — had dementia.”

Slyvia began to investigate whether American football-induced hits and concussions could  lead to illnesses like Alzheimer’s and dementia and how the NFL should go about protecting the men who play the sport. These former players with mental issues from their time playing American football could not receive disability care from the league because they could not prove that their injuries where from the NFL.

A University of North Carolina study into 2,500 former NFL players  would show they faced a 37 percent higher risk of Alzheimer’s disease than other men their age.

In response the NFL and the NFL Players’ Association started the “88 plan”-Mackey played in #88- which provides $88,000-a-year for nursing home care and up to $50,000 annually for adult day care for the former players suffering from football induced mental issues.

While its good that they are taking care of the former players, it left me thinking about what will be the fate of the T.O’s and the Reggie Bush’s of today… Even worse what about the boys and girls playing from age 4???

Its a hard one to think around because this is like the top most sport to Americans but it is being found to be very dangerous.

Similar issues have arisen in other sports such as kickboxing but I guess these dudes know what they are getting into a suit up and run out on the field.

Despite the odds, a tiny group of people infected with the human immunodeficiency virus manage to stay healthy, never showing symptoms of illness.

So what is shielding this special group of HIV-infected people, dubbed “elite controllers,” whose bodies control HIV so well the virus remains virtually undetectable? A team of Canadian and U.S. scientists believes it has solved part of the mystery.

Led by Rafick-Pierre Sékaly of the Centre Hospitalier de Université de Montréal, the team has discovered a “memory T cell” mechanism that protects these rare patients from viral diseases.

Published in the advance online edition of the journal Nature Medicine, the researchers explain how a protein in some people’s DNA shields against life-threatening immune illnesses.